An Industrial IoT (IIoT) platform is software that collects the sensor readings of machines and shows the state of every machine on one screen. IIoT means the industrial internet of things, which is the connecting of machines to the internet so that they report their own condition.
Imagine a company in Pune that rents out diesel generator sets to construction sites. It has 120 sets, spread across the city and beyond. Each set has a small computer fitted next to it, called a gateway. The gateway reads the fuel level, the engine hours and the battery voltage from the set's industrial sensors. It sends these readings over the mobile network. A platform in the cloud receives them. The owner's screen shows all 120 sets on a map. It turns a set red when its fuel falls below 20 per cent, so a fuel tanker can be sent before the set runs dry.
Without the platform, the owner would have to phone each site or send a person to look. With it, the owner also sees which sets are idle, so they can be moved to a customer who needs one, and bills the customer for the engine hours that the set actually ran. The same platform can be used by a water utility for its pumps, by a cold-chain operator for its refrigerated trucks, or by a factory for its machines.
The small computer near the machine does some work itself, such as filtering the readings, before it sends them. This is called edge computing. The link is usually a cellular IoT module, a SIM-based part of the gateway, and the SIMs are managed by IoT connectivity management. The same platform can also read tags with RFID, radio tags fixed to goods.
The platform shows the state of each machine. To predict failures from the readings, it passes them to asset performance management (APM). The ideas behind it are described in industrial IoT. The platform is also used for solar trackers and for industrial energy management.